


good and bad, I define these terms, quite clear, no doubt, somehow

by janie_tangerine



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: (WHICH WILL BE TO LOVERS LATER BUT WE'LL SEE), Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, BAMF Brienne of Tarth, BAMF Jaime Lannister, Enemies to Friends, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, I Don't Even Know, Superheroes, Supervillains, Tumblr Prompt, not for cersei fans as usual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:46:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23964091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/janie_tangerine/pseuds/janie_tangerine
Summary: I am the hero and you are the villain. I am out of options so I came to you for help but there is literally a 90% chance you will let me bleed out.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 15
Kudos: 163





	good and bad, I define these terms, quite clear, no doubt, somehow

**Author's Note:**

> Sooo this was for the prompt in the summary but I figured out I'd switch things a bit for this one so it wasn't completely obvious ;) it... probably owes something to the time I watched megamind at ten PM years ago on TV but just take it for what it is XDDDDD also the title is always from bob dylan, I own zilch, idk if I want to sequel this because it's a decent verse but we'll see and I'll saunter downwards to repost some more. /o\

He wouldn’t be _here_ if it wasn’t his very last choice.

Except that Jaime really has no other fucking option right now so it’s either the thrice-damned _Beauty of Tarth_ or nothing, a moniker that the papers gave her a long time ago and that has pissed her off since because she’s _anything but_ , and he’s only seen her a couple of times but they were enough to grasp why it stuck.

Privately, he always thought it was kind of cruel, but the only time he tried voicing that opinion Cersei was nearby, so he didn’t really _finish_ voicing it and left it there. Anyway, it’s not like their paths usually cross - she’s usually there to be a nuisance to Cersei, not to _him_ , and he and Cersei have extremely different areas of expertise when it comes to protecting people - being born with superpowers never quite left them a chance to do anything but, but Jaime always enjoyed it, he _likes_ helping others.

Except that right now he’s in a fucking mess because he had bitten more than he could chew and disrupting a whole drug ring that he had been trailing for a while with some help by Inspector Tully from KLPD, who has been feeding him classified information for months, _on his own_ … ended up not being a good idea. He’s faster than the average human, _very much_ , and he can bend fire to his will, but he’s also not invincible and he miscalculated, which means that now he’s been shot one time too many by one person too many and either someone patches him up or he’s going to bleed out in a ditch -

And the only option he has _right now_ is _her_ lair, which everyone knows is right next to where they left him to bleed out but everyone avoids at the same time because who even wants to have contact with _her_?

Still.

It’s either that or nothing. Maybe he’ll see if he can convince her in exchange for a favor or something.

He drags himself as far as the door, then crashes on his knees before he can knock -

And the door opens, and he sees blue eyes looking down into his, and they’re not as cold as he had imagined they’d be, and he _faints_.

That was definitely _not_ dignified.

\--

He opens his eyes.

He’s lying on a bed - a _nice_ bed. Nothing opulent or covered in silken sheets, like the one at the manor, but nonetheless comfortable, with freshly cleaned cotton sheets embroidered in tiny blue flowers. Now that he looks at them, the embroidery is clearly uneven, but still… somehow charming. He groans as he sits up, and then -

“Don’t,” a voice says, a _female_ voice, “you’ll pull your stitches and it took me a while to patch you up.”

He falls back against the pillow and turns towards his right -

Oh.

There _she_ is.

She’s standing next to the right side of the bed, and woah, she’s _tall_ , he thinks, has to be taller than him even if not by much. She’s wearing her usual dark blue uniform, but no mask over her face now, not that she wears it _that_ often - it doesn’t cover her broken nose and the spots of freckles over her pale face or her too-large lips. Her straw blonde hair is tied up in a messy bun and she’s looking down at him with _those_ large, clear blue eyes, and she looks… sad.

Then she shakes her head and helps him sit up, gently, _carefully_ , and now he can see that he’s in a nice room with blue walls, books on the shelves, a wardrobe and a window staring on the road where he had been dumped.

“You - _you_ patched me up?” He asks, aware that he sounds completely dumbfounded. She snorts.

“You were bleeding out on my damned doorstep, _Goldenhand_.” She spits the name like it was venom. “And I don’t suppose you crawled over it to die, except that it’s only me and a few others here and no one else can actually patch a wound, so it was either me or nothing. You’re welcome.”

“I just asked,” he says defensively. “I didn’t think -”

“What,” she snorts, and he doesn’t like how that tone makes her sound, she has a _nice_ voice, “that _I_ , the unfortunate Beauty of Tarth, would do something nice for a man in need? Of course you didn’t think.” She sighs, falling down on the chair. “Don’t flatter yourself. Doesn’t make you an exception.”

_Ouch_. The way she says it, it sounds so _sad_ , it makes him feel like shit. But -

“Sorry,” he says, meaning it. “I just - I guess I didn’t assume -”

“You _didn’t_ assume,” she laughs again, “ _of course_ you did not. _Again_. Listen, please, if you can’t say anything that’s not _I thought you would leave me there to die because that’s what everyone would assume considering what this entire city thinks of you_ just keep your mouth shut and leave it.”

He should.

He _should_ , after all it’s not like he had any other reason to assume that, not when Cersei has told him over and over again of the countless times she and the Beauty fought these last few years, but the way she says it -

“Listen, we started with the wrong foot,” he says, deciding that he’s _not_ letting this go. “But you helped me and I obviously am not working with all of the information _you_ have, so how about you help me out and explain what this is about?”

“Oh,” she says, “let’s see. _Why_ did you assume I was going to let you die? Because everyone thinks that I’m spending my time here and only coming out to protect bank robbers or cash in money from supposed minions I have spread all over the city or frighten young children or disrupt your sister’s work while she rescues them? Because I was involved in _that_ incident at that beauty pageant where your sister was supposed to attend but didn’t because she had _superhero duties_ to attend, the entire place exploded and all of those girls forgot ever entering into another pageant again? Because I was the only person in _her_ class who didn’t come to the graduation ceremony and everyone decided I was a sore arse with zero socialization skills and that I’m as ugly inside as _I look_ and so I can only be the bad guy of the situation? Don’t bother answering me, I can see it in your face.”

Jaime closes his mouth. Damn. She sounded _really_ resentful. And he’s about to ask her what it’s it about except that then she reaches up and wipes a tear from her eyes and for a moment her fingers tremble, going transparent -

Right.

She has water powers. She can actually _turn into water_ , if she wants to. She might not be controlling it so much right now, and for a moment he shudders thinking of the months his father tormented both him and Cersei in order to _properly_ control their fire - or well, _him_ , because it took Cersei nothing to learn and it took him longer, but still -

“Well,” he says, “I see there’s another side to your story, so how about you share it?”

“I don’t think you would want to hear it,” she replies.

“Try me,” he retorts back, wishing she would _give him a chance_ , and then she sighs and sits down next to him, staring straight at him.

“Okay,” she says, “let’s see if you do. Starting from the last point… yes, I _did_ miss that graduation. You know why? Because your sister _and_ all her friends hated me. They hated me from the second I walked inside that class when we were _eleven_ , and back _then_ they just made fun of the fact that - well, my father was a regular human, she and the others come from families where everyone in each generation has _some_ kind of mutation, and so I controlled it worse than them because no one taught me. Then, well. Back then I was plain, then I became like _this_ , so then I was too ugly for them to consider, which means that I graduated _with a higher score than all of them_ without a single person who’d talk to me for seven years because oh, right, meanwhile my father died and if I wasn’t at school I’d be at his bedside. But never mind _that_.” She sighs. “When I left, I meant to - do good. I _really_ wanted to. This - the house was the only valuable thing my father left me, so I sold my own apartment and took residence here, except that _all_ of my former classmates including your sister trash-talked me for a while to _anyone_ they’d know, even contacts, which meant that most children who were in contact with them were fucking _afraid of me_ because they were told I was as mean as ugly, which meant that _all_ their friends thought the same and so on.” She stops, looks down at her hands.

“It also meant that no one in the police wanted to be _my_ contact and the only people who agreed to help me out with anything were criminals wanting to get out without involving the police, which is why I have helped smuggle enough of them to the North with no one being the wiser, but what people knew… became that _I helped criminals_. Not that _I helped take down rings with former criminals having informed me_ and without the police wanting to help _me_. Then oh, the pageant. _This_ one you won’t want to hear.”

Jaime, who has felt all of his blood rush from his face, shakes his head. “What about the pageant?”

“ _Your sister_ was supposed to run in it but your father told her that _Wildfire_ had to be attend the opening of that group home they named after her.”

“Yeah, I remember that. And so?”

“ _So_ , I remember having had a run-in with her the previous day while she was trying to kill one of _my_ informers, and she wasn’t exactly putting her heart in it, and for your information, I have some basic… telepathy skills.”

“You can _read minds_?”

“Not really, but if someone is thinking very loudly and we’re both running on adrenaline, I _can_. And she was definitely thinking that _if it can’t be me then it can’t be anyone else_ , so the next day I dropped by the pageant just to make sure nothing was amiss except that the moment I showed up they about kicked me out and I told them that they might need me after, because you know… _water powers_ , but they didn’t want to hear it, and oh, wait, it exploded in _wildfire_ , didn’t it? Except that then I came back and put it out but they decided _I_ started it in the first place. Because of course I was _jealous_ , as if I would even care by now.”

Jaime’s first instinct is defending Cersei, because of course she _wouldn’t_ -

Except that she was pissed off that she missed the pageant.

_And_ she had seemed strangely _not_ sad when she heard the news.

He says nothing.

“All right. And?”

“Huh. You went farther than I thought you would. Well, that’s about fucking it. I mean, each single time I tried to do anything good she had made sure everyone would assume I had bad intentions, most criminals she ends up going after as _strangely_ my own informers so of course I have to fight her, she made sure everyone would hate me while we were in school and I don’t know what she says about _this_ place… actually, what does she say about it?”

“Uhm,” he says, “that… you invite criminals here all the time and you live with a bunch of them?”

She snorts. “I live,” she says, “with five cats, the only single orphan in King’s Landing who isn’t afraid of me -”

“Wait, what’s _that_ about?”

She shrugs, her cheeks flushing darker. “I was going around Flea Bottom at some point because it’s the only place where I can actually _help_ people without people assuming I want to rob them, Pod was sitting outside his door in the middle of winter, I asked him what was wrong, he said his parents locked him out because they couldn’t feed him anymore and he was useless, I tried to have a word with them and they said they didn’t even want him and so I brought him here, what was I going to do? Let him starve? At least _someone_ thinks I don’t want to sell them on the black market. So, I was saying - right, Pod, then there’s my former mentor in school who also was kicked out of her university position a few years later because your father needed it for a friend -”

“Wait, _Catelyn Tully_ lives with you?”

“When she’s not with her family in Winterfell, yes. She helps me with tech and a few other things and she found me a contact to help smuggle people out of the city. And that’s about _it_ , no one else is living here. I run my empire of crime all on my own, _Goldenhand_ , and you’re free to believe me or not but that’s the truth of it. And since _you_ never were a problem and I know you actually are in this because you like it and not because you want the publicity, I had no moral issues with patching you up. And if your sister had been in your place I’d have patched her up too, because as much as I hate her, I wouldn’t let anyone die on my fucking doorstep. There you go,” she says. “That’s the whole truth. Feel free to believe me or not, but if I were you I’d avoid moving for the next couple of days. That was a bad wound.”

She stops, her eyes falling down to her joined hands.

Jaime wants to say _something_ , but he spends five minutes without finding a word, because _what do you even say to this_ , and then she makes a wounded noise in the back of her throat.

“Well, I guess it was good enough you heard me out.”

“Oh, for - can you give me _a second_?” He blurts. “I lost I don’t know how much blood and you proceeded on informing me of things that I had no idea of until yesterday and which about _might_ be a tad shocking to hear, I never said I didn’t believe you!”

“… Oh.” She shakes her head. “Right. I’m sorry, I just - I got caught up feeling sorry for myself, I guess. You’re right. I’ll - get you something to drink.”

She stands and leaves the room, long legs clad in blue jeans disappearing beyond the door.

Jaime takes a ragged breath and _thinks_ about it.

The moment she comes back and he’s drunk the glass of water she handed him, he clears his throat.

“It adds up,” he says.

“What?”

“Your story. It adds up. With… everything. And with a lot of things concerning my sister I always overlooked because it was convenient. And - I’m sorry about it. You don’t sound at all like the person people make you to be.”

“Thanks, I guess,” she says, not quite looking at him. “I, uh, I - appreciate it. And - I mean, I know who cut you open like that.”

“… You do?”

She nods, wearily. “The Boltons,” she sighs. “Been trying to nail them for a while. I helped some five informers get out while i was doing it. But they’re too much for me on my own and they’re too well-connected. The father tried to hire me once.”

“He _did_?”

“I told him to fuck off and that didn’t help, so. I haven’t managed yet.”

Jaime nods, thinking on it.

Hm.

They were too much for _him_ and his police connections, but maybe -

“Say,” he says, slowly, “you have informers in _their_ midst?”

“Yes,” she nods. “I’m not going to tell you.”

“I wasn’t asking. But I was thinking - I have contacts in the police. My sister doesn’t care to help me out with this one job and my father can’t care less as long as I honor the family name. _You_ have them from the inside and you live close to their headquarters. And, uh, we are… kinda complementary. With powers, I mean. Maybe… we could join forces?”

She looks up at him, blinking in surprise. “What?”

“Why not? I mean, you obviously want to dismantle them, _I_ want to dismantle them, we could help each other out, you’re definitely not a horrible person and you didn’t let me die on your doorstep, and if you want a better reputation you’re going to have to start somewhere, right?”

She _stares_ at him as if she can’t believe he just said that and as if he’s considering it, and after a long while he’s hoping he hasn’t overstepped, but then -

Then she tentatively holds a hand out.

“Brienne,” she says.

“Wait, sorry?”

She rolls her eyes. “It’s my damned _name_ , Goldenhand. I’m pretty sure that if I have to work with you maybe it’d be good if we introduced ourselves properly?”

Oh. _Oh_.

He immediately holds out his right, the one that’s always slightly burned because that’s where he sprouts flames, shaking hers. She has long, strong, warm fingers. Her hold is very careful, very gentle, same as before.

He thinks he won’t mind camping in her house as long as it takes for him to get back on his feet and for the two of them to plan their raid.

“Jaime,” he says, letting himself smile, “my name is Jaime.”

She smiles back, her eyes wide and _warm_ , and they’re so, so very pretty, he thinks.

He’s glad that he dragged himself on her doorstep.

He really is.

End.


End file.
